Catherine Filene Shouse, Patron Of The Arts

December 18, 1994|By New York Times News Service.

NAPLES, Fla. — Catherine Filene Shouse, 98, philanthropist and arts patron who was the founder and major benefactor of the Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Va., died Wednesday in her Florida home.

Mrs. Shouse, the heiress to a retailing fortune, was a lifelong champion of the performing arts.

In 1977 President Gerald Ford gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A year earlier, Queen Elizabeth II had made her Dame Commander of the British Empire.

Her grandfather, William Filene, was the founder of the Filene's department-store chain, and her father, Lincoln Filene, founded Federated Department Stores.

In 1919, she became the first woman appointed to the Democratic National Committee, and in the mid-1920s, she was chairwoman of the First Federal Prison for Women, where she instituted a job training and rehabilitation program.

In the 1940s she became a dog breeder, importing hunting dogs from Germany and Switzerland and starting her own kennel at Wolf Trap Farm, a tract 15 miles west of Washington, that she had purchased in 1930.

In 1949, she joined the National Symphony Orchestra's board, and she served as its vice president (1951-68). In 1959 President Dwight Eisenhower appointed her to the first board of the National Cultural Center, now known as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.